"Don't listen to your users": A startup fesses up

STARTUPS: Gillian Morris is the founder of Hitlist, a successful travel app. She recently wrote a sensationally popular first-person post for Medium, sharing what she has learned as a founder. Read more on Medium

Two years ago today, two friends and I sketched out an app, Hitlist, that would alert you when there were cheap flights to places you wanted to go.

Since then Hitlist has helped a quarter million users in 163 countries book over $6m of travel. Almost none of that happened in our first year of existence.

We were press darlings, our users tweeted and emailed their love, and the metrics we tracked were telling the right story. But no one was buying.